We like to think of the deities as having always existed, time out of mind. In one sense they're timeless, of course, but in another sense they're closely linked to the cultures and societies of specific times and places. It’s important to know when each deity ‘showed up’ and in what culture they did so, in order to understand which versions of the myths are the original ones and which are later alterations.

That’s right, later cultures came along and changed the earlier versions of myths - in most cases because they were taking over a society and wanted to downplay or even demonize its deities in favor of their own.

You may be familiar with the way the writers of the Tanakh (a.k.a. the Old Testament portion of the Bible) depicted Asherah, Ba’al, and other deities as evil demons. You may also have heard about the ways the medieval Christian church condemned the European Pagan deities as evil spirits in the cases where they couldn’t manage to transform them into local saints.

These kinds of propaganda campaigns have been going on as long as there have been people and pantheons. Yes, polytheist people did it to each other, back before monotheism was a thing. It's a pretty common part of human culture worldwide.

This issue is especially important if you’re interested in Minoan spirituality, because most people’s information about the Minoan deities comes from later Hellenic Greek sources. That’s like getting your information about the Middle Eastern Pagan deities from the Bible, or your information about the Druids from the Romans.

So I thought I’d tease out some of these stories and separate the later Greek disinfo campaign from the original Minoan myths.

I've written about the time differential between the classical Greeks and the Minoans. It’s easy to conflate all the ancient civilizations into a single mental category that just says ‘a long time ago.’ But they didn’t all live at the same time, and in particular, the Hellenic Greeks came along centuries – almost a millennium – after the height of Minoan culture. And they did a bit of rewriting of the Minoan mythology in order to suit their own purposes.

Let’s start with the Minotaur-and-Labyrinth myth – you know, the one where Theseus is a great hero who travels to Crete and defeats the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne, who is essentially just a girl with a ball of string. But Theseus is a Greek culture hero, invented as a tool for adapting Ariadne’s mythology to Greek values. He's not Minoan; he didn't exist in Minoan times. In fact, the Minotaur-and-Labyrinth story is a very late addition to his mythic corpus.

To the Minoans, Ariadne was a powerful goddess in her own right who traveled to the Underworld and was, among other things, a conductor of souls (psychopomp) and a guide for shamanic activity. Her Labyrinth is the path to the Inner Self and the Underworld.

And that horrible monster, the Minotaur? He’s the Bull-God who is Ariadne’s partner in the Labyrinth, a face of the multi-faceted Minoan bull god Tauros Asterion.

The Minoans revered the Minotaur; they didn’t hate or fear him.

And no, in Minoan Crete, Zeus didn’t abduct and rape Europa, either…that’s also a Greek rewriting of the story, to put the goddess in her ‘proper place’ of submission. Abduction was a common marriage method in Hellenic Greece, so that story is in keeping with Greek values.

To the Minoans, the goddess was always a willing and equal partner in her relationship with the god. It's likely that the original myth was one of sacred marriage, not Hellenic-style abduction.

Speaking of Zeus…you may have heard that Zeus was the deity born in the Psychro Cave on Mt. Dikte in Crete. I bet you can guess that I'm going to say that's wrong.

Much like the Romans who followed after them, when the Greeks encountered foreign pantheons, they often equated each deity with one of theirs. This is both a way to connect the two cultures and a sneaky way to erase the indigenous deities of the culture they're conquering (or attempting to conquer).

So when they saw Dionysus as the most prominent god in the Minoan pantheon, or at least the one they wanted to be on top, they equated him with Zeus. They called him Cretan Zeus, which was eventually shortened to just Zeus. But really, it's Dionysus who is born in Rhea's cave.

So to be clear: Zeus is Greek, not Minoan, and he wasn't born in a cave on Crete. And he's not the same as Zagreus, who is a Minoan bull-god related to both the Minotaur and Tauros Asterion.

Are you confused yet? The Greeks wanted you to be. They wanted you to think that all these deities came from them and not from a prior civilization that was possibly more advanced (at the very least, more egalitarian and peaceful) than the Greeks.

I just mentioned Rhea in the story of Dionysus; she was the Minoans’ Earth Mother Goddess. To them she represented the Earth itself – specifically, the island of Crete.

Each culture in the ancient world had its own Earth Mother goddess that symbolized the land that culture lived on. Rhea fulfilled that role for the Minoans. When the Greeks came along many centuries later, they had their own Earth Mother goddess – Gaia – who represented mainland Greece.

Now, they couldn’t have someone else’s Great Mother competing with theirs, so they wedged Rhea into their pantheon and demoted her to the position of Gaia’s daughter or granddaughter, depending on which version of the story you read.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many of the Minoan deities the Greeks imported into their pantheon and altered for their purposes, in part because we don’t know all the names of the Minoan deities in their original forms.

It’s likely that there was a Minoan version of Aphrodite; in Ariadne's Tribe we call her Antheia. Poseidon probably comes from Posidaeja, the Minoans’ sea-mother goddess whose name appears in the Linear B tablets. Eileithyia, the Minoans’ midwife-goddess who safeguarded all women during childbirth, shows up in the Greek pantheon as a bitter old woman who helps ‘good girls’ (submissive, modest, quiet) but punishes ‘bad girls’ (those who dare to speak for themselves and tend to their own needs) with difficult labor.

The Greeks weren't evil, though I can’t say I would have enjoyed living in their culture. They simply did what every conquering culture has done throughout time: reworked the conquered culture’s mythology to suit their own purposes.

So if we’re interested in Minoan spirituality, we have to tease out what was there before the Greeks came onto the scene. Then we can connect with the deities of ancient Crete and give them the reverence they’re due.